Just when you think it is safe, another global hack hits the headlines, and the cycle of frustration and worry begins anew. Are my systems safe? What would I do if our data was compromised? Is my IT prepared for a full-scale hacker attack?

If you care about your business, you’re asking yourself these questions. And you should be.

Too often, a company’s approach to cyber security is reactive, with the IT support team focusing on vulnerabilities and improving security systems after an incident has occurred. It’s an ineffective method and leaves the organization susceptible to further attacks.

Taking a proactive, network wide cyber security approach allows the organization to pull together plans, policies, and tools to better anticipate and prevent cyber attacks from happening or mitigating them before damage is done. The first step in putting together a proactive approach is to take steps to truly understand the steps of the cyber kill chain.

And now for the bad news; we’re only halfway through 2017 and things look even bleaker.

Nowadays, threats are harder to detect, automated attacks make everyone a target, and vulnerable devices are everywhere. Just when you think you’ve got everything figured out, sophisticated criminals are taking old threats and beefing them up with new technologies.

The recent Petya panic that came right on the heels of Wannacry is a reminder that when it comes to ransomware, you can never let your guard down.

Mobile devices and the move to server virtualization and cloud services are in part driving the need for nimble architecture like software-defined networking (SDN). This is more than buzz; it is a watershed phenomenon. Analyst firm International Data Corporation (IDC) predicted that SDN as a global market will grow to $12.5 billion by 2020.

By 2020, it is expected that more than 38 billion devices will be connected to the Internet, many of them mobile devices that rely on wireless access. Just as network boundaries are being stretched in multiple directions by the Internet of Things (IoT) and mobility, threats are becoming more complex and hackers more sophisticated than ever.

While the ongoing drive towards digital transformation provides new opportunities for business growth, it can also make companies more vulnerable to cyber risks. Technology trends such as the cloud, IoT and BYOD have dramatically upped the number of endpoints open to exploitation by cyber criminals.

With cybersecurity experts predicting a rise in sophisticated cybercrime such as ransomware attacks, distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks and advanced persistent threats (APTs), organizations need to ensure their networks are properly protected. For more than 17 years, next-generation firewalls have been the solution of choice on account of their strong network perimeter protection capabilities and high network security processing power. But with the rise of the borderless enterprise, it’s now necessary to move away from perimeter-centric solutions and opt instead for more comprehensive protection.

You cannot open the newspaper or turn on television news without seeing a report of a cyber security breach in the United States. These attacks are costly and they impact everyone from restaurants to medical offices to retailers and government.